Chapter 280: Raise The Barrier

The lights and air conditioners of the city of Marimgar all roared to life at the same time, drawing a surge from their stored battery capacity with every air conditioner running full blast at the same time, trying to get the buildings back down to their set temperatures.

They had more than enough. Kalli had made sure of that when she upgraded the city.

It had been designed to keep the air defences active, and they required power on a level that no air conditioning unit in the universe could hope to measure up against.

Now, they just had to keep the barrier up and wait out the storm, or form fire brigades, and make sure that the damage wasn’t so bad that it completely destroyed the region.

The ash plains should provide some resistance to the spread of forest fires, but at the moment, they were also the primary cause of most of them. Without knowing whether there was anything left to save, it would also be high risk for minimal reward to send anyone out.

A few frost and water mages, maybe.

But other than that, most of the city couldn’t actually do anything about the situation.

Seeing the barrier in action, and the city’s power back on, the rest of the population didn’t hold back, and within minutes of the message going out, the barrier was at full capacity. Simple math said that it wouldn’t actually take much to take it down if they were being attacked by a horde of monsters.

But against environmental threats? It was more than enough.

The guards at the walls, who had retreated to the housing built along the upper wall’s interior, were not so sure when they came out. The worst of everything had been blocked out by the barrier, but when you stood on the wall, you could feel the intense heat of it and feel your hair lift from the static.

That was taken as a sign that things outside were not in a good way, even though what they could see was no worse than any other smoky day.

That gave Kalli a bit of time to work on the plans to get everyone to either go to school, or teach a class.

They definitely needed it.

Fortunately, they did have at least a few teachers here, and some military veterans who used to train soldiers. If you could do that, you could probably teach any other adult how to do a skill.

The only issue that she was running into was that the ones who had the skills either had a huge backlog of work already, or weren’t the ones with teaching experience.

Professor Tymon was the only skilled teacher here who had a particularly practical specialty, and most of the others had taught grade school.

A noble and worthy profession, which they were going to need again soon.

But not exactly a transferrable skill when what you needed to teach was magic or tinkering, as a System ability. Most of the heroes only vaguely understood how their own skills worked, so teaching them was a long shot.

Kalli looked at the list of plans on her desk, and realized that all the plans in the world meant nothing if they couldn’t find the people with the talent to teach the system skills.

Someone had to know how to do it.

But everyone she looked up was already struggling with the duties they had, and just asking them to spend a bit of time teaching would put a strain on everything.

Now, if it was combat training, they had lots of people for that.

The only one that Kalli could reliably state that they could turn out system users for was cooking. They had people who could teach that.

Kalli checked the barrier, and saw that it was full, and that it was still crackling with radiation, with thick smoke coating the outside. The fires were clearly bad, so Kalli went to check the satellite feeds.

Only to find that there weren’t any.

Most likely, the solar storm had completely killed communications with them.

Getting any sort of signal through this level of interference would be a miracle. Just keeping the vehicles running outside the walls would be difficult if they weren’t all running on mana. Since they were, Kalli assumed that they would be fine, but she wasn’t sure if anyone tried.

That was something that she could do, while they were waiting.

Matteo was likely still in the dining room where they held the meeting, unless he went back to the workshop. So, that was where Kalli started the search for the Techno Wizard.

"Coordinator, good work with the city barrier. That couldn’t have been cheap. The fact that it keeps the smoke out is totally worth the mana that it takes to keep it going. What can I help you with?"

Kalli smiled at the dark-haired Techno Wizard.

"I was thinking about buying you a helicopter so you could try to convert it to mana fuelled flight."

"I think that we already talked about this, but why today?"

Kalli shrugged. "It’s as good of a day as any, and nobody is going outside right now. I don’t even see the water mages volunteering to go out and try to stop the fires."

Matteo laughed. "That’s because they all know that they’ll get radiation burns the moment that they step out there with any skin bare. That crackling on the barrier isn’t getting any weaker, and the audible reminder is keeping everyone well away from the walls."

Kalli sighed. Right, even though they could go out in full armour, the mages couldn’t wear the really heavy armour and still use magic.

"Well, how about we go to the workshop, and I’ll get you set up to start working on the helicopter. You managed to do an internal combustion engine already, so I’m guessing that you should be able to do a turbine.

It’s all burning fuel to make heat, after all."

Matteo patted her on the shoulder with a pitying look.

"There is just one small problem, Coordinator. I know all about internal combustion engines, but I have never actually seen a turbine engine up close. Even though I know the concept, changing the fuel isn’t as simple as swapping diesel for mana.

If it was, we would have done all the vehicles at once.

There are parts needed, plus the knowledge to make the whole thing work. I think that I can figure it out, as soon as I understand the fuel injection. But it’s going to be more than an afternoon job."

Kalli smiled. "That’s fine, we’ve got a few days of this. If we can have mana powered helicopters when the solar storm ends, we can get to work fixing what’s left to repair."